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CREMATION 



AND 



OTHER MODES OF SEPULTURE. 



BY 



R. E. WILLIAMS, A.M 




" Omnes homines terra et cinis sunt." — Ecelesiasticus xvii. 3^. 




PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1884. 






Copyright, 1884, by R. E. Williams, A.M. 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 028665 



PEEFAOE. 



Inhumation, the practice of burying the dead 
in the ground, is no doubt a custom deeply in- 
trenched in the honest convictions of some and 
in the equally honest prejudices of others. To 
some the custom seems to be sanctioned by Chris- 
tian doctrine, and it is certainly favored by those 
sentimental associations which ancient usage has 
established between mortality and the grave. In 
fact, religion, poetry, and rhetoric may be said to 
have combined their forces in defence or in main- 
tenance of the custom. All persons of ordinary 
information are, however, aware that in the last 
few years weighty objections to the practice of 
inhumation have been pressed upon public atten- 
tion in a manner which entitles them to respect. 
These objections are, for the most part, grounded 
in that superior knowledge of sanitary science 
which distinguishes the present age. They have 
been most earnestly insisted upon in the coun- 
tries of Europe most advanced in science and 
in civilization, Germany, Italy, France, and they 
have been generally put forward and commended 
by men of science, often physicians eminent in 
their profession. And it may be added that the 

3 



4 PREFACE. 

objections have engaged most attention and re- 
spect among persons whose special knowledge, 
theoretical or practical, best qualified them to 
grasp the full significance of the facts and rea- 
sonings involved. 

Dr. C. Gr. Hussey, of Pittsburg, whose long 
career as a man of business has lessened neither 
his early love of science nor his interest in its 
" application to the relief of man's estate," sug- 
gested the attempt made in this little volume to 
discuss the subjects of interment and the substi- 
tution of a better method. Taking earnest in- 
terest in the reform and regretting that it has 
not been more agitated in this country, he not 
only procured the preparation of the essay, but 
furnished for it hints in the form of facts and 
arguments. 

No apology can be needed for the freedom 
with which the subjects of burial and cremation 
are here treated. The writer has tried to say 
clearly and frankly what he thinks, happy in 
enjoying the felicity (ages ago called rare by a 
great writer,* though now common) of being 
able to exercise such liberty without fear of any 
very serious consequences. 

R. E. W. 

Pittsburg, Penna., February 4, 1884. 

* Kara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis, et qua* 
sentias dicere licet. — Tacitus, Hist. i. 1, 



CREMATION 

AND 

OTHEE MODES OF SEPULTUKE. 



MODES OF SEPULTURE. 

In putting the dead out of sight, mankind 
must always have been more or less influenced 
by their notions respecting the nature of life or 
the soul. If in the early ages they regarded 
death as the end of all, they must have looked 
upon the corpse of their fellow-man as mere rub- 
bish, at once offensive and defiling, of which 
they might properly rid their dwelling in what- 
ever way seemed to them easiest or most expe- 
ditious. As a matter of fact we know that such 
was not the practice of primitive man, whether 
of the higher or the lower races, no trait of 
those ancient nations being better attested than 
their care for the dead. Their care for the dead 
was evidently inspired by a psychology which 
owed nothing to the speculative genius of meta- 
physicians or to the researches of physiologists. 

1* 5 



6 CREMATION. 

This psychology was the simple product of the 
popular mind, and whatever development it un- 
derwent in some cases should be credited to the 
poets or to the theologians rather than to the phi- 
losophers. In its earliest form or simplest ex- 
pression it can be most clearly traced among the 
Greeks. In the twenty-third book of the Iliad 
we are enabled to look directly into the early 
Greek mind, and see how it regarded the dead 
and their relation to the living. 

Achilles, grief-stricken by the recent death of 
his beloved friend Patroclus, and "heavily moan- 
ing" in his troubled slumber, was visited by the 
spirit of the deceased. Patroclus appeared pre- 
cisely as he had looked in life ; " like himself in 
all respects, as to size, and beautiful eyes, and 
voice," says the poet, even his garments being 
apparently the same. Standing over Achilles as 
he slept, the spirit reproached him with forget- 
fulness and neglect of the duty he owed his 
friend, which it implored him to discharge. The 
duty in question was that of rendering to the 
dead body those services which were deemed 
essential to the repose of the soul. " Bury me," 
says the spirit, " that I may as soon as possible 
pass the gates of Hades," and the explanation is 
added that until his remains should be buried 
" the souls or images of the deceased with whom 
he was appointed to dwell would not permit him 
to mingle with them beyond the river." 



CREMATION. 7 

In the passage of Homer, of which a portion 
is here cited, we have to do with that belief con- 
cerning the dead and their relation to the 
living which has been most widely entertained 
both in -ancient and in modern times by man- 
kind in a certain stage of civilization. The soul 
or spirit is conceived as " a thin, unsubstantial 
human image," comparable to vapor or a shadow, 
the latter being the name sometimes given it. 
It is supposed to be " the cause of life and 
thought in the person it animates, 55 and also to 
" possess independently the personal conscious- 
ness and volition of its corporeal owner. 55 To it is 
ascribed the power of leaving the body to which 
it is attached, and of moving with incredible ve- 
locity through space. Though " mostly impalpa- 
ble and invisible, 55 it is deemed capable of exerting 
great physical force, and of appearing to men, 
both asleep and awake, as a phantasm or visible fig- 
ure, apart from any material body. And perhaps 
most noteworthy of all is its assumed ability " to 
enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other 
men, of animals, and even of inanimate objects. 55 
The extensive prevalence of this belief will not 
be questioned by any one who reflects that it 
furnishes foundation for the popular recognition 
of the demoniac, the fetish, and the ghost. Upon 
the notion that the soul could easily leave its 
habitation in one body and take up its abode in 
another the doctrine or theory of metempsy- 



8 CREMA TION. 

chosis, or transmigration of souls, was readily en- 
grafted, — a belief which has been held by count- 
less millions, and which at the present time is 
probably held by a greater number of confessors 
than any other doctrine of the future life. 

When speaking or thinking of the doctrine of 
a future life, as prevalent among savage or half- 
savage tribes, it is necessary to guard against the 
misleading effect of familiar terms. To ascribe 
to such people any definite or precise conception 
of the immortality of the soul, as the doctrine is 
understood among enlightened nations or has 
been maintained by philosophers, would imply 
failure to apprehend the condition of the barba- 
rian mind. All that we can safely say is that 
the savage very commonly believes in the con- 
tinued existence of the soul after the death of 
the body. In other w r ords, the savage is very 
often a sincere believer in ghosts, being unable, 
it would seem, to believe that an existence or a 
principle of so much energy and significance has 
utterly and instantly become a nonentity. Some 
time at least must elapse before he can so think 
of the deceased; and in the mean time, if he 
dreams of the departed, he believes that he has 
seen him, and regards the vision as evidence of 
his survival in aerial or shadowy form.* How 
rapidly in such cases evidence corroborative of 

* E. B. Tyler's Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 19. 



CREMATION. 9 

the conclusion accumulates it would be easy to 
illustrate from the experience of even enlightened 
communities, where such primitive notions touch- 
ing the spirits of the departed still linger as su- 
perstitions among the less instructed members. 

A belief in the vitality and activity of the soul 
after the death of the body seems to have pre- 
vailed universally among our x^orth American 
Indians, the belief being clearly revealed in their 
mortuary customs, though the exact significance 
or relation of the details may not be always trace- 
able. The modes of sepulture and the funeral 
usages of our aboriginal tribes have been re- 
cently investigated and described with great ful- 
ness and lucidity by members of the Bureau of 
Ethnology connected with the Smithsonian In- 
stitution.* One noteworthy outcome of these re- 
cent researches is the general fact that every mode 
of disposing of the dead ever practised in the Old 
World — that is, every mode ever heard of as 
there practised — is found in use or to have been 
at some time in use among one or more than one 
of these native tribes. Inhumation is at present 
and seems to have been always the most common 
usage; but it is practised with considerable vari- 
ation, not only in the attendant ceremonies, but 



* See Introduction to the Study of the Mortuary Customs 
among the North American Indians, by Dr. H. C. Yarrow, 
Act. Assist. Surg. U.S.A. 



10 CREMATION. 

in other respects. Thus, while the Mohawks of 
New York and some other tribes placed the 
body in an upright position in a large round 
hole prepared for the purpose, the Carolina 
tribes, having enclosed the body in a cane hur- 
dle, placed it horizontally in a grave about six 
feet deep and eight feet long. The Pimas of 
Arizona tie the bodies of their dead with ropes, 
passing the ropes around the neck and under 
the knees, and then drawing them tight until 
the body is doubled up and forced into a sitting 
posture. A perfectly round hole, four or five feet 
deep, and hollowed out at. one side of the bottom 
into a sort of vault, is the receptacle into which 
the body is thrust, with whatever exertion of 
strength may be found needful. The Coyotero 
Apaches are even less careful of dignity or ten- 
derness in putting away their dead, being con- 
tent to deposit them in the cavity left by the re- 
moval of a rock or the stump of a tree. Having 
crammed the body into the smallest possible 
space, they replace the rock or the stump, and 
then arrange a number of stones around its base. 
On the other hand, the Klamath and Trinity 
Indians of the Northwest coast receive credit 
for exhibiting " considerable taste and laudable 
care" in their treatment of the dead : enclosing 
the body in such a coffin as they can provide by 
placing four boards around it, they " cover it 
with earth to some depth." "A heavy plank, 



CREMATION. \\ 

often supported by upright head- and foot-stones, 
is laid upon the top, or stones are built up into a 
wall about a foot above the ground, and the top 
is flagged with others." Around the graves of 
the chiefs even " neat w T ooden palings are ar- 
ranged, each pale ornamented with a feather 
from the tail of the bald eagle." Furthermore, 
these graves are placed near the dwellings of the 
tribe, and thus seem to be the objects of some 
care. The Muscogulges, the Chickasaws, and 
some other tribes bury the dead in the wigwams 
or lodges in which they die, and the Eound 
Valley Indians of California, who occupy thatched 
houses, follow the same custom, but "the house 
thus used is always torn down, removed, rebuilt, 
or abandoned." 

Next to those Mounds which have been the 
subject of so much investigation and discussion, 
and which were certainly places of sepulture, the 
stone graves or cists of Tennessee are no doubt 
the most interesting relic of the mortuary cus- 
toms of extinct Indian tribes. They show, as 
Dr. Yarrow remarks, the manifest care taken by 
the survivors to provide for the dead what they 
considered a suitable resting-place. They are, 
in fact, " burying-grounds with regular graves." 
Whoever constructed them " formed an excava- 
tion twelve or eighteen inches deep, placed stone 
slabs at the bottom, ends, and sides, forming a 
kind of stone coffin, and after laying in the body, 



12 CREMATION. 

covered it over with earth." These ancient cem- 
eteries are, says Major Powell, exceedingly abun- 
dant throughout the State; often hundreds of 
graves may be found on a single hill-side. Both 
their construction and arrangement show not less 
clearly than the more celebrated Mounds that 
they are the work of a people different from any 
of the existing aborigines. Competent observers 
have been struck by the resemblance of these 
Tennessee cists to graves of the reindeer period 
in Europe. 

Caves, from time immemorial, have been used 
as burial-places, and caves which have been used 
for the purpose by the Indians have been found 
in nearly every State of the Union. In Utah 
Territory, in Colorado, and in Alaska caves still 
used as places of burial by the Indians have been 
described, though in reference to one or two of 
them it has not been fully ascertained whether 
the cave is the place in which the bodies are de- 
posited soon after death, or the place into which 
the osseous relics from many temporary graves 
are gathered for preservation and security. With 
cave-burial may perhaps be classed burial in the 
fissures of rocks, which are really used by some 
tribes as the last resting-places of their deceased 
members. 

Tribes living so far apart as the Seminoles of 
Florida and the Miamis of Ohio practised what 
is called surface-burial, sometimes using hollow 



CREMATION. 13 

logs such as they found in the woods ; sometimes 
splitting a tree and hollowing out the halves so 
as to receive and enclose the body, the reunited 
parts being then held together by withes ; and 
sometimes simply covering and protecting the 
body with a pen of logs. 

Cairn-burial, in early times so common in the 
British Islands, is still very common among the 
tribes of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra 
Nevadas. In the Gaelic, Irish, and Welsh lan- 
guages the word cairn means a heap or pile, and 
such, in fact, is the monument which the Indians 
referred to erect over the dead body, which is 
placed in a cavity left by the removal of an im- 
bedded stone. The cavity is, however, well lined 
with skins, and poles are so arranged as to pro- 
tect the body while supporting the huge cairn 
heaped over it. 

The Crows, the Blackfeet, and some tribes of 
the Sioux dispose of their dead by placing them 
in a lodge, either a new one set up or an old one 
formally set apart for the purpose. Certain tribes 
on the Northwest coast use as receptacles for the 
dead " wonderfully carved, large woo '1 en chests, 
which sometimes rest upon a platform and some- 
times rest upon the ground/' In shape they re- 
semble a small house with an angular roof, and 
" each one has an opening through which food 
may be passed to the corpse," — the same sort 
of box formerly used by the Creeks, Choctaws, 

2 



14 CREMATION. 

and Cherokees, whose ideas and customs have 
been much modified in the last hundred years 
by Christian teaching and association. 

Another mode of sepulture very commonly 
practised even' by some tribes who occasionally 
use other methods is exposure on scaffolds. 
These are attached to trees, if trees are acces- 
sible; and where trees are not convenient the 
scaffold is constructed with forked posts, upon 
which cross-pieces are laid to support the floor- 
ing of small poles. The corpse, before being 
placed on the scaffold, is sometimes tightly 
wrapped in skins or blankets, and is sometimes 
placed in a box. When the body has been for 
some time exposed in this manner it is taken 
down, and the bones at least carefully buried. 

Cremation as a mode of disposing of the 
dead is at present, as apparently it has always 
been, practised by certain tribes on the western 
slope of the Rocky Mountains; and there is 
abundant evidence that it w T as formerly, if it is 
not now, common among more eastern tribes. 
Some investigators find or think they find con- 
clusive indications that it was a custom among 
the Mound-builders, a view rather probable, in- 
dependently of positive evidence. 

Mummification, sometimes by mere exsicca- 
tion or drying of the body, sometimes by em- 
balming, and sometimes by a combination of 
both methods, was formerly, if it is no longer, 



CREMATION. 15 

practised by some tribes. We are told that cer- 
tain tribes of Virginia were religious in thus 
preserving the remains of their chiefs; and ac- 
cording to recent researches, some tribes of the 
Northwest coast embalm or mummify the bodies 
of males alone, while other tribes thus honor all 
the members of certain classes. 

As some tribes living on the coast and on 
rivers bury their dead in the water, and as it is 
credibly stated that the Caddocs, Ascena, or 
Timber Indians leave those warriors who fall in 
battle to be consumed by beasts and birds of 
prey, thus exposing them to what they deem the 
most honorable mode of burial, one may safely 
affirm that every method of sepulture ever heard 
of in the Old World has its counterpart in the 
New. The custom of the Parsees of Bombay at 
the present day — a custom brought by them from 
their ancient home in Persia — of exposing their 
dead to be devoured by vultures is familiarly 
known ; but the usage of the Timber Indians 
finds a closer parallel in the practice of the an- 
cient Colchians and Iberians, who, while cre- 
mating persons of ordinary or commonplace 
character, distinguished the eminently brave and 
honorable by devoting their mortal remains to 
be devoured by well-bred dogs kept for the pur- 
pose. Both the ancient and the modern people 
may be presumed to have thought it a higher 
destiny to nurture the nobler animals, — better be 



16 CREMATION. 

the food of dogs than of worms ; and if the life 
of the hero was to be prolonged under novel 
conditions, — a widely prevalent belief among 
savages, — then there could be no question 
whether the quadruped or the reptile was to be 
preferred, or which of them w r ould afford the 
more dignified mansion. 

All the Indian tribes whose modes of sepul- 
ture have been reviewed assume in their mortu- 
ary rites that the spirit, soul, eidolon of the de- 
parted still exists, is aware of the care taken of his 
remains, and is benefited by the care or injured by 
neglect. Whether the body is buried in the ground 
or consumed by fire or devoured by beasts, the 
spirit with its shadowy form survives; and 
whether it is to be happy or miserable in its 
disembodied state and new environment is be- 
lieved to depend somew T hat upon the attention it 
receives at the hands of survivors. Hence rites 
of sepulture, hence ceremonies of mourning sys- 
tematically arranged and conducted, and hence 
funeral feasts in which the spirit is supposed in 
some way to participate, even as it is supposed 
to enjoy in some way the food set for its con- 
sumption and the weapons of war buried or 
burned with the body for its use. 
. In recent discussions of the subjects of inter- 
ment and cremation it has been usual to attach 
some importance to the practice of the great 
nations of classical antiquity. Italian advocates 



CREMATION. 17 

of cremation habitually appeal to the sentiment 
inspired in educated minds by recollections of 
the great people in whom they claim a hereditary 
interest, assuming, if not directly asserting, that 
by adopting the reform they recommend the 
Italians will discard a barbarian innovation and 
resume the well-approved usage of their re- 
nowned predecessors, or progenitors, as some of 
them fancy. Italians, however, are not the only 
friends of the proposed change who seek to rec- 
ommend it to liberal minds, by treating it as the 
revival of a custom of universal prevalence among 
both Greeks and Romans during the most pros- 
perous and splendid ages of those highly civilized 
peoples. But in this mode of advocating the 
reform there is some misrepresentation or un- 
intentional exaggeration. 

Among the Greeks interment, or burial in the 
ground, was undoubtedly the first mode of sepul- 
ture, but incremation was certainly introduced at 
a very early date as an alternative. The passage 
already cited from the Iliad shows that it was 
practised at least occasionally in the heroic age, 
some scholars supposing that it was first adopted 
during the Trojan war to facilitate, or rather to 
render practicable, the transportation of the mortal 
remains of the Greek chiefs to their homes over 
sea. Indeed, according to one form of a Greek 
legend, Hercules was the originator of cremation, 
finding it necessary to burn the body of Argius 
b 2* 



18 CREMATION. 

in order to fulfil the vow he had made to convey 
the remains to the dead man's father, Likymnios. 
In the historical times of Greece there is abun- 
dant evidence that the two modes of sepulture, 
interment and cremation, were both practised, 
the choice being apparently left to the predilec- 
tion of individuals or families. Or, the selection 
may have been determined by the particular 
school of philosophy which the persons followed 
or favored. We know that Thales and his dis- 
ciples, regarding water as the origin of all things, 
reckoned it most fit that the body should be re- 
duced to its original elements by putrefaction ; 
while Heraclitus, on the other hand, holding fire 
to be the first principle, he and his sect preferred 
cremation. 

Pious care for deceased friends and positive 
reluctance to part wholly with their mortal re- 
mains were notable traits of the Greek character, 
traits which led to the practice of burial in their 
houses. In one of his dialogues * Plato expressly 
states that the usage existed in early times, and 
as they must by degrees have discovered the in- 
conveniences of the custom, it seems probable 
that cremation was adopted, by some at least, as a 
substitute, which, while entirely unobjectionable 
on the score of health and comfort, enabled them 
to retain the cherished relics in their dwellings. 

* In the dialogue Minos. 



CREMATION. 19 

The coexistence of the two modes of sepul- 
ture, interment and cremation, among the Greeks 
must be a familiar fact to every person who has 
read one of the most popular and easily accessible 
books, Plutarch's " Lives." Indeed, the great 
biographer by his incidental statements makes the 
point so clear, that one cannot but wonder at the 
doubts and questions which have been raised on 
the subject. In his life of Theseus, Plutarch cites 
the legend according to which " a coffin of a man 
of extraordinary size" was found in the hero's 
grave, proving that even in the heroic age the 
usage of burial existed. In his life of Solon the 
same w 7 riter describes the contest between Athens 
and Megara for the possession of Salamis, where 
the claims of each party were founded on the dif- 
ferent modes of burial. And where at the close 
of the same biography the author pronounces 
" absurd and fabulous" the current story that 
Solon's ashes had been scattered about the island 
of Salamis, the comment show 7 s that the crema- 
tion of the legislator's body was presupposed. 
Moreover, Plutarch expressly mentions the crema- 
tion of Timoleon and of Philopoemen. The truth 
seems to be that the general practice differed in 
different cities or states. Thus, while inhuma- 
tion or interment was the exclusive custom in 
Sicyon, in Sparta, and in some other cities, cre- 
mation was the prevalent though not exclusive 
custom in Athens and in most of the cities in 



20 CREMATION. 

Magna Grsecia. The assembly before which 
Pericles delivered his famous funeral oration had 
come together, as Thucydides states, to deposit 
in tombs the bones of those who had first fallen 
in the war. " Having erected a tent, they laid 
out the bones (osta) of the dead three days be- 
fore," * says the historian, — a statement which im- 
plies that the bodies had been already cremated. 
In his account of the memorable pestilence which 
swept away so large a part of the population of 
Athens, the same writer mentions as one of the 
abuses which resulted from the demoralizing in- 
fluence of the calamity, " the shameless modes 
of sepulture 55 to w T hich some had recourse, " for 
on the piles prepared for others, some anticipat- 
ing those who had raised them, would lay their 
own dead relatives and set fire to them; and 
others, while the body of a stranger was burning, 
would throw on the top of it the one they were 
carrying, and go away. 55 f That cremation was 
not the exclusive usage even in Athens is an ob- 
viously fair inference from a passage in Plato 5 s 
dialogue, the Phsedo, in which Socrates, when 
questioned by his disciple Crito as to which mode 
of sepulture he should prefer, declared his indif- 
ference. 

Among the Etruscans and other tribes of an- 
cient Italy cremation seems to have been a com- 

* Thucydides, ii. 34. f Id., ii. 52. 



CREMATION. 21 

mon, if not the prevalent usage, though there is 
reason to believe that in the early ages of Rome 
interment was preferred by certain families. 
Plutarch states that King Numa's body was not 
burned, for the reason that he himself forbade it. 
In the code of the Twelve Tables (452 B.C., year 
of Rome 302), both modes w T ere recognized in 
the law, w T hich prohibited the practice of either 
within the walls of the city.* So late as in the 
674th year of Rome, Sylla, having outraged the 
mortal remains of Marius and dreading retalia- 
tion at the hands of his adherents, ordered by 
will that his own body should be burned, thus 
departing from the custom of his family, the Cor- 
nelian Gens, who had always inhumed their dead. 
At this time, however, in consequence probably 
of the increasing intercourse of the Romans with 
the East, cremation had become common, and it 
is certain that from this time onward the practice 
met with such favor as soon made it almost the 
only mode of sepulture, at least among the upper 
and well-to-do classes. And such it continued 
to be during many generations until it very grad- 
ually gave place again to inhumation or interment, 
partly no doubt under the influence of Christian 
teaching and example. 

The first Christian congregation in Rome was 
undoubtedly a Jewish community, and during a 



* Cicero de Legibus, lib. ii. 58. 



22 CREMATION. 

considerable period Jews occupied a position of 
controlling ascendency in the Roman Church. 
While the opinion of Merevale that the Roman 
Christians occasionally at least burned their dead 
should not be lightly rejected, there is no doubt 
that they generally followed the Hebrew usage 
and buried the entire body in the ground. It is 
pretty certain that the Jews in Palestine always, 
or nearly always, inhumed their dead, in part in- 
fluenced by Egyptian custom and, in early times 
at least, perhaps influenced by the notion, cer- 
tainly entertained by them, that the soul or ra- 
tional life continued for some time after death to 
have more or less intercourse with the body. 
The custom of interment, with or without em- 
balming, having become established among the 
early Christians through Hebrew influence, it is 
easy to perceive how the fitness of the mode 
might seem to them to be confirmed or ratified 
by their belief concerning the sacredness of the 
body and " the resurrection of the flesh." True, 
in the " Octavius"* of Minutius Felix, a Chris- 
tian " apology" of the third century, the heathen 
interlocutor of the dialogue, having directly as- 
serted that the Christians execrate the funeral 
pile and sepulture by fire on account of their be- 
lief in the resurrection, the apologist, an intelli- 
gent Roman lawyer, replies that Christians have 

* Octavius, c. 10, 31. 



OB EM A TION. 23 

no fear of injury or loss by cremation, but have 
adopted the ancient custom of inhumation as 
more eligible and commodious. While such was 
the view of the more thoughtful and well-in- 
structed class, there is no room for doubt that in 
the common sentiment of the majority of the 
early Christians some ground existed for the 
heathen's mocking imputation. Christians early 
misunderstood St. Paul's language (1 Cor. xv. 
35, 36, 50) to mean exactly what he emphatically 
denies, namely, "The resurrection of the flesh or 
corporeal frame,"* and their persecutors some- 
times took occasion to deride the belief and en- 
hance the pain of the living by exposing the 
bodies of their martyred friends to wild beasts and 
birds of prey, or by burning them and casting 
their ashes into the nearest river. The Chris- 
tian belief was thus der'ded in the martyrdom 
of Polycarp, and in that of the Christians of 
Lyons and Vienne. 

There are no records by which to trace with 
any degree of fulness or exactness the gradual 
cessation of the custom of cremation in the 
Roman world. Tertullian, in the second or 
early in the third century, refers to certain 
heathen as objecting to cremation for w r hat ap- 
pears to him a superstitious reason, the fear of 

* Dean Stanley's Christian Institutions, p. 295 in Scrib- 
ner's edition . 



24 CREMATION. 

injuring the soul believed to be still connected 
in some way with the body.* With this weak 
reason he contrasts what he deems the better 
reason which prevented Christians from cre- 
mating their dead, namely, " Unwillingness to 
treat even the dead body with harshness or bar- 
barity," and then presently he scoffs at the rude 
inconsistency of the heathen multitude in first 
savagely (atrocissime) burning their dead, and in 
then most gluttonously (gidosissime) feasting them ; 
" with the same fires, doing them good and 
evil."f Of course Tertullian alludes to those 
funeral banquets which among peoples in a cer- 
tain stage of civilization have been celebrated in 
all parts of the world. The intimate association 
of these banquets, often idolatrous in form, with 
the practice of cremation very probably sug- 
gests one of the reasons which rendered the early 
Christians so tenacious of a different mode of 
sepulture. As evidence of the reality of the 
peril the fact may be mentioned that, before the 
close of the fourth century, Augustine bitterly 
complains in a letter that in some of the African 
churches the funeral banquets were the occasion 
of revelling and drunkenness, scandalous to the 
neighboring heathen. How slowly the change 
from cremation to interment took place is ap- 
parent from the mention, in the Theodosian 

*De Anima, c. 51. f De Resurrections, c. 1. 



CREMATION. 25 

code, of both customs as still existing a.d. 438. 
Macrobius, however, who wrote somewhat earlier, 
about a.d. 420, expressly states that the custom 
of burning the dead had then wholly ceased, and 
that all he knew about it he had learned by read- 
ing of the past.* His statement doubtless refers 
chiefly to Rome, or possibly to Italy, and the 
presumption is that in the outlying provinces of 
the empire the custom continued many years 
longer. Indeed, a law of Childeric the Third, 
and another of Charles the Great, prohibiting 
the practice, shows it still alive on the northern 
side of the Alps in the eighth century. Under 
the Roman empire proper it was never pro- 
hibited by statute or rescript; even the Chris- 
tian emperors refusing, if they were asked, to 
interfere with a practice which had been sanc- 
tioned by the approval and example of so large 
a part of civilized mankind, and to which no ob- 
jection could be fairly alleged on the score of 
either decency, good morals, or religion. 

Some writers slightly conversant with history, 
and accustomed from education and habit to 
regard inhumation as the mode of sepulture pre- 
scribed by divine institution and the very nature 
of things, have been at considerable pains to ac- 
count for the origin of the other mode. In the 
light of modern research concerning primitive 



* Saturnalia, lib. vii. c. 7. 
3 



26 CREMATION. 

culture such speculations on the subject of cre- 
mation seem rather superfluous, if not futile. 
We have seen the two modes coexisting for cen- 
turies among the tribes of ancient Greece and 
Italy, and even among the Indians of North 
America. When, furthermore, we recollect that 
throughout much the greater part of Asia, from 
the earliest times until the present day, crema- 
tion has been the ordinary mode of putting away 
the dead, we cannot feel much at a loss to ac- 
count for the usage. It is surely safe to presume 
that there is something in the method which 
commends it to the favor of mankind indepen- 
dently of any religious dogmas or philosophical 
theories which have been sometimes or may be 
associated with the practice. No doubt the con- 
ception of fire as the great purifying element has 
frequently formed part of the theory, religious 
or philosophical, which recommended cremation 
to the acceptance of heathen people ; but if they 
ascribed personality to the element, invoking it 
in solemn or in spontaneous prayer, their idolatry 
was both more graceful and less degrading than 
that practised by other pagans at the inhumation 
of their dead. In connection with this topic 
the ancient Hebrews are usually cited for their 
stern and steadfast opposition to sepulture by 
fire. In truth, if Jerome, who spent many years 
in Palestine, understood the Hebrew language 
and customs, the mortal remains of good Jewish 



CREMATION. 27 



kings were often cremated by way of special and 
peculiar honor. For proof see in the Vulgate 
(Jerome's) version, Jeremiah xxxiv. 5, and four 
or five other passages in which the English trans- 
lation mentions " burnings for", the dead. How- 
ever, whether Jerome or our modern Hebraists 
are right, the fact mentioned by Suetonius,* that 
among the multitude who gathered around the 
funeral pile of Julius Caesar in the Forum Jews 
were most conspicuous, keeping up their lamen- 
tations during several nights, seems to show that 
even the ancient Jews had not been taught to 
regard cremation with the least abhorrence or 
aversion. Indeed, that they did not so regard 
the practice it would be easy to prove even from 
the Hebrew Scriptures, but the point is not 
worth making. 

Of the theories or speculations in which the 
attempt is made to trace the custom of crema- 
ting the dead in various countries to a single 
source, one only seems worthy of mention, — the 
curious one which ascribes the origin of the 
practice to the ancient Hindoos, from whom as 
from a centre it was gradually diffused. The 
chief supporter of the view, a Rev. Dr. Jamieson, 
appears to have found the suggestion of it in the 
juxtaposition or collation of two facts of dif- 
ferent orders, — one of them, the tremendous 



*Lib. i. c. 84. 



28 CREMATION. 

domination of solar heat in Hinciostan, which 
naturally instigates the people to pay their de- 
voirs to it in the form of fire. This notion he 
sees confirmed in a fact mentioned by the 
romancing biographer of Alexander the Great, 
Quintus Curtius, that in India persons enfeebled 
by age or by illness were judged by their sages, 
the gymnosophists, to make a fine and truly re- 
ligious ending by cremating themselves alive. 
Quintus Curtius is poor authority on such a sub- 
ject, but in the passage* to which Dr. Jamieson 
refers, he says that unless the persons cremated 
were still breathing when they mounted the pile 
the sages held that the fire was polluted by the 
offering, — a statement which, if true, would imply 
that these Hindoo sages fully sympathized with 
those ancient followers of Zoroaster, the Parsees, 
who refused to burn their dead for the express 
reason that the act would be an indignity offered 
to their divinity, the most pure and omnipotent 
Sun. 

In truth, it is scarcely more certain that the 
first Aryan emigrants to India cremated their 
dead in their new home than that the first Aryans 
who wandered westward or northwestward from 
the central table-land carried the same custom 
with them in their migrations. The Celts, the 
Scythians, the Lithuanians, the Germans, the 



* De Rebus Alex., lib. viii. c. 9. 



CREMATION. 29 

Scandinavians, etc., were all cremation! sts when 
first met with in history, and the convenience 
and general fitness of the mode must have 
been from the first even strikingly manifest 
under the inclement skies of Middle and North- 
ern Europe. In the alternately clamp and frozen 
regions inhabited by most of these tribes fire 
would have no terrors even for the timid, and 
besides the mere difficulty of excavating graves 
at certain seasons, fire, as a mode of sepulture, 
would commend itself both to the senses and to 
the imagination of the dwellers in the sombre 
North as the very emblem of life and hope. 



3* 



CREMATION. 

This superficial survey of the modes of sepul- 
ture which have prevailed in different ages and 
nations has seemed an appropriate introduction 
to some observations by way of comparing or 
contrasting the two chief methods mentioned, 
those of cremation and interment. While in 
Italy, in Germany, in Austria, and, to some ex- 
tent, in France and Great Britain, the subject 
has been earnestly discussed in the last twenty 
years, relatively little has been written about it 
in this country. But it would be a mistake, I 
believe, to infer from the general silence that the 
question is here generally regarded with either 
contempt or indifference. On the contrary, it 
engages the earnest thoughts of many. Those 
who make themselves known as interested in 
the practical question involved speedily discover 
that they have sympathizers on all sides of them, 
even persons for whom the thought of death, 
whether of themselves or of near kindred, re- 
ceives a fresh tinge of gloom from the thought 
which an inveterate custom makes its associate, 
the thought of slow corruption and its foul con- 
comitants. The number is not small, and it is 
30 



CREMATION. 31 

believed to be very large, to whom this thought 
is the single bitter constituent in the general 
doom, and it is not rendered in the least less 
repulsive by the reflection that the constituent 
is no necessary or inevitable ingredient, but a 
purely human addition to the cup. It is one 
of the horrors of death simply because the time- 
honored usage of inhumation is so generally 
sustained by opinion. Until recently opinion — 
called by Pascal Queen of the world — has been 
strong enough to suppress complaint, to awe even 
protest or incipient remonstrance into submissive 
silence. As a consequence of this rigorous rule, 
compliance with the universal custom is a matter 
of necessity from the mere absence of the means 
by which the abominations of interment might 
be avoided. And besides, if the means were 
available, much more than ordinary courage 
must be possessed and exercised by every one 
who for himself or friends prefers a mode of 
sepulture more scientific and less abhorrent and 
revolting to the sensibilities.* 

The charge that cremation is a violation of the 
respectful tenderness due to the dead has been 
often made, and no doubt seems to some well 
founded. It is a very ancient objection to the 
practice, having been, as we have seen, one of 
the reproaches which Tertullian flung at the 



* See note A at end of volume. 



32 CREMATION. 

heathen of the third century. Certainly neither 
Tertullian nor those who repeat his objection in- 
tend to ascribe sensation to the dead, the real 
ground of their reproach being merely the ap- 
pearance of rude violence in burning, as it were 
rubbish, what lately was most precious, and in 
thus seeming callous to the feeling of sympathetic 
beholders of the scene. It is noteworthy that 
the Aryan cremationists of ancient India sought 
to avoid or to counteract this subjective effect of 
their action by invoking the fire in a prayer for 
tender treatment of the body, imploring the 
element " not to scorch the face or rend the skin 
or lacerate the mortal remains" committed to its 
power.* They thus appealed to the imagination 
to allay the pain which imagination caused. In 
truth, even inhumation, even to hide cherished 
remains in the ground and leave them to their 
cold, dark solitude, must have seemed at first a 
proceeding almost equally offensive on the score 
of tenderness. It is probable enough that the 
feeling had some influence in leading the early 
Greeks, with their lively sensibilities and imagina- 
tive nature, to bury their dead in their dwellings, 
as it led other tribes who believed in the con- 
tinued intercourse of the soul with its inanimate 
body to bury their dead in caves or artificial 
tombs, where they could visit them. Embalming 

* Rig Veda, x. 18. 14. 



CREMATION. 33 

for the preservation of the body in a place easily 
accessible was another custom inspired by the 
same sentiment, in some cases at least, and a 
much more general mode of soothing sensibility 
unavoidably wounded was the practice of dress- 
ing the corpse in costly raiment, and of burying 
with it articles greatly esteemed or admired, — 
usages familiar at the present day. But the sen- 
timent which suggested such modes of mitigating 
the loneliness of the grave to the imaginations 
of survivors long ago became unconscious in the 
prevalence of its effects ; the graveyard became 
the cemetery, that is, " the sleeping-place" of the 
departed, or it is " God's Acre," a place conse- 
crated as the abode of peace and unbroken rest. 
Religion and poetry harmonize in recognizing 
the impressive repose that reigns within its pre- 
cincts, and to those who confine their survey to 
the surface, the place may often well seem to 
clothe the grave with a vesture of purity and 
beauty sufficient to conceal or put out of mind 
its repulsive features. 

Happily or unhappily, with the change of times 
men also change; they change in their mental 
habits. An ever-increasing number of those 
who were formerly content to follow imagina- 
tion, or, in Bacon's phrase, to accept the show 
of things, now prefer sterner guidance as they 
seek, by independent scrutiny, to get at realities. 
Now, the truth clearly is, that those who shrink 



34 CREMATION. 

in horror from the thought of sepulture by fire 
to the thought of sepulture in the ground as a 
refuge have never been at pains to comprehend 
the conditions which they thus prefer. They 
have never, in common parlance, realized the 
abominations of the grave by attending the body 
to its misnamed resting-place, or home of peace. 
These phrases and others of like import are part 
and parcel of the poetical or fictitious system by 
which, in a less enlightened age, a part of man- 
kind endeavored to hide from themselves and 
from others the dread mvsteries of the charnel- 
house and the vault. These processes were for- 
merly in some degree mysteries, at least to the 
majority, but they are mysteries no longer, and 
however revolting the subject, there is really no 
sufficient reason for reticence, if it should not 
rather be said that the time for the utmost free- 
dom of speech concerning them has fully come. 
Wegmann-Ercolani, the eminent Swiss physician 
and philanthropist, who has written so much and 
so well on the subject of cremation, is a guide 
whose statements touching this topic one may 
adopt safely, that is, in the assurance of -falling 
into no excess or exaggeration of language. 
" The grave," he says, " presents the most ter- 
rible spectacle which it is possible to conceive, 
whether the body within it is that of a famous 
statesman under a magnificent monument or 
that of a pauper in a potter's field. In either 



CREMATION. 35 

case a most foul and intolerable stench meets 
the daring investigator who opens the abode of 
peace. And however great the horror and dis- 
gust caused by the sense of smell, the impressions 
produced by inspection are yet more horrible. 
The brain, the noblest part of man, which may 
shortly before have furnished the wisdom that 
saved an empire, — the brain has fallen out of its 
bony case, a shapeless, unctuous, stinking mass, 
abhorred even by the worms which so raven- 
ously seize upon the flesh, the heart, the lungs, 
and especially the intestines. The eye-sockets 
are empty, and every part, except the bones, is 
rotten/revolting, harrowing to the senses in the 
highest degree." And then he puts the question, 
" Why, in the name of a merciful God, should we 
subject ourselves and those we love to so dread- 
ful a condition while science at once offers us 
ways and means of avoiding it, by a rapid and 
complete destruction of the body?" "Verily,'' 
says the same writer in another place, " verily, 
the man of sensibility, animated by pious rever- 
ence for the dead, who, laying aside all illusions 
and self-deception and aided at once by science 
and by imagination, looks into the grave and for 
a moment watches the process of decaj^, will 
never again speak or think of the common mode 
of sepulture as the mode enjoined by respect or 
inspired by affection or by tenderness for the 
departed." 



36 CREMATION. 

The inanity, or rather the mendacious signi- 
ficance of our current terms and phrases touch- 
ing the grave as a place of rest, the home of 
peace and so forth, becomes apparent from an- 
other point of view. In the quaint language of 
Sir Thomas Brown,* — with the change of a single 
word, — every reader must have seen reason to 
ask, " Who knows the fate of his bones, or how 
often he is to be buried ? Who hath the oracle 
of his dust, or whither it is to be scattered ?" 
No fact is more notorious than the desecration of 
graves; no trait of civilized mankind is better 
established, or more glaringly manifest, than 
their indifference, if not their contempt, for what, 
in cant or in solemn mockery, they call, or used 
to call, the sanctity of the tomb. There is not a 
city or town in the country which has not been 
partly built upon violated graves ; scarcely a rail- 
way or a superior highway could be found whose 
construction did not involve the removal of 
skeletons, or even bodies imperfectly decayed, 
mortal remains laid down by sorrowing kindred 
in the consoling faith that they should lie there 
undisturbed. The simple, naked truth is that 
when a few years have passed over a grave, no- 
body not connected by blood with the occupant 
seems to question either the right or the duty .to 
remove the re]ics, if any reason satisfactory to 



* " Epistle Dedicatory" of his Hydrotaphia, or Urn Burial. 



CREMATION. 37 

common sense can be given why the removal 
should take place. The Chinese entertain the 
solemn belief that by disturbing the bones of 
their relatives, or by allowing them to be dis- 
turbed, they bring calamity upon themselves and 
their families, — a belief fatal to the introduction 
of railways and even of commodious highways. 
We pity or we despise their pious superstition, 
smiling superior in the conviction of our better 
knowledge and more enlightened religion; and as 
if to illustrate both, when we resolve to remove 
the bones and skeletons of former generations 
from the pathway of progressive enterprise, we 
frequently neglect to secure even decency of 
handling in the performance of the task. The 
grave-digger in Hamlet was a model of thought- 
ful reverence in comparison with the men some- 
times employed to handle the relics of humanity, 
so sacred theoretically and so contemned in fact. 
However, no reflection is intended upon those 
who recognize the necessity of removing the 
dead for the sake of the living. About the 
urgency of the necessity there can be no ques- 
tion. With the advance of science and indus- 
trial development in all directions, preserving 
and protracting human life and increasing the 
means of subsistence, the multiplication of man- 
kind goes on at a rate never seen before; so 
mighty and overwhelming the vital tide rolls for- 
ward, so imperious is the demand of living men 

4 



38 CREMATION. 

in need of room, that but little respect for the 
needs of the dead is possible. The pressure in- 
creases every year, and it must continue to 
increase at a ratio which warrants the confident 
anticipation of a pressure, in the near future, be- 
fore which sentiments and usages now respected 
by some as almost sacred must disappear as insig- 
nificant. In Europe temporary cemeteries have 
long been a necessity. Many years ago Jacob 
Grimm declared that in the church-yards of Ger- 
many it was hardly possible to find a grave which 
had not been at some time disturbed for the ad- 
mission of additional occupants. In the tem- 
porary cemeteries just mentioned, a few years 
limit the right of the actual tenant, whose remains 
are then taken up and consigned to the smallest 
space required to hold them. Switzerland allows 
such removal after seven years, and Germany 
allows it after fifteen years, — a most liberal term, 
as France concedes only five years as the longest 
period during which the inhabitant of one of 
these graves may repose undisturbed in his 
sepulchre, his so-called place of everlasting rest. 

In our vast country it is of course quite true 
that, except locally or in certain cities, this terri- 
ble pressure of the living upon the dead for room 
is not yet experienced, but it may be truly said 
to be imminent in all its ghastly intensity. Al- 
ready, in almost every considerable city of the 
land, burial in a fairly commodious cemetery is 



CREMA TION. 39 

the privilege of the comparatively rich, while the 
tastefully decorated and eligible " fields of the 
silent' 7 in which the rich repose are often watched 
with a grudging and speculative eye, before which, 
could they read its expression, the subterranean 
tenants would tremble for the validity of their 
titles. As regards the most beautiful and attrac- 
tive of our ornamental cemeteries, the continued 
reservation of the ground for its original purpose 
is simply a question of time. The land, whose 
exchangeable value is a continual growth, is 
already admitted to be too valuable for such a 
use, and in the Great Republic, where families 
are sustained by no law of primogeniture or en- 
tail, and where, therefore, wealth does not usually 
remain in families through the second generation, 
it is easy to forecast the time when there will be 
no sentimental influence of blood or birth suffi- 
cient to resist the financial or economical reasons 
in favor of secularizing even the cemetery now 
most venerated or admired. 

The reasons already mentioned are far from 
being all the grounds which render one's right 
to his grave the most uncertain and insecure of 
tenures. To the grounds specified must be added 
those accidents by flood which occur much more 
frequently than the inattentive reader of news- 
papers would suspect, accidents which sweep 
away the sheltering earth and expose in some 
cases scores or hundreds of bodies, some of them 



40 CREMATION. 

recently interred, to be devoured by dogs and 
hogs, or trodden under foot. Then the body- 
snatchers are everywhere on the alert, those 
" human wolves," as Shenstone calls them,* to 
whom no unguarded grave is sacred, and whose 
victims are much more numerous than sensitive 
persons are willing to believe. And the Jerry 
Crunchers, in the pursuit of their nefarious 
traffic, hardly cause more anxiety among the 
poor, or relatively poor, than those who rob graves 
in pursuit of a ransom occasion to the wealthy. 
The robbers who carried away the body of the 
late A. T. Stewart from St. Mark's church-yard 
in New York, and those who stole the body of 
the late Earl of Crawfurd from the Dun Echt 
mortuary chapel in Aberdeen, are well under- 
stood to be the members of an ignominious fra- 
ternity whose infamous audacity and enterprise 
render it expedient to protect by an armed guard 
the graves of the late President Garfield and 
others by whose remains these peculiar brigands 
might hope to make great gain. 

* " Where is the faith of ancient Pagans fled? 

Where the fond care the wandering manes claim ? 
Nature, instinctive, cries, protect the dead, 

And sacred be their ashes and their fame! 
Arise, dear youth ! e'en now the danger calls ; 
E'en now the villain snuffs his wonted prey ; 
See, see ! I lead thee to yon sacred walls, — 
Oh ! fly to chase these human wolves away." 

Shenstone 1 s Elegies. 



CREMATION. 41 

These facts and others of like tenor easily pro- 
ducible, which prove how little sanctity or even 
respect attaches to the grave, and how slight is 
the tenure by which even those most sumptu- 
ously interred hold possession of their subter- 
ranean dwellings, seem to show several things. 
They show that very many persons who descant 
on the practice of inhumation as a venerable in- 
stitution of ancestral authority, which it would 
be impious to lay aside, are mere slaves of custom 
or routine. They show that those many excellent 
and sincere adherents of the ancient usage who 
favor it because it seems to them a decent and ap- 
propriate mode of performing a duty of affection 
and civilization, are being rapidly brought to face 
conditions which must imperatively require them 
to examine the subject with reference to reform. 
Such persons cannot be supposed content very 
long with a custom which is carried out on a 
basis of fictitious assumptions. They will not 
long be satisfied to buy cemeteries and build 
monuments for themselves or others, in the full, 
rational assurance that after a few years, say a 
hundred, or fifty, or even less, the cemeteries and 
the monuments shall give place to cotton-mills 
or warehouses or railway stations. And once 
again, these facts, as they show the scandalous 
and wholly unsatisfactory operation of the custom 
of interment, and, by consequence, the necessity 
of reform, constitute an argument in favor of 

4* 



42 CREMATION. 

cremation, since cremation is the only alternative 
mode seriously proposed. 

These facts, however, are not those upon which 
the advocates of cremation rely as chief grounds 
of the proposed reform. In urging the necessity 
or the importance of a change, it is no doubt a 
strong argument in its favor if the actual usage 
presents such offensive features and abuses as 
have been pointed out in the practice of inter- 
ment. But the reformer might be met with the 
offer of amendment or removal of the corruptions 
and abuses as being merely incidental evils, a 
resort from of old familiar to the defenders of 
things as they are. To employ it with satis- 
factory results in the case of inhumation would 
be difficult, even if the practice were fairly open 
to no other objections than those already men- 
tioned, which, however, is far from being the 
case. The sanitary argument against the cus- 
tom is one which has never been successfully an- 
swered, which cannot be successfully answered, 
and which, from the nature of the facts upon 
which it rests, cannot be weakened in its practi- 
cal effect by any amendment generally practicable 
of the mode of sepulture against which it is 
directed. And what is here said as to the in- 
efficiency of any possible amendment may be 
said with equal pertinence of improved or ad- 
vantageous conditions under which the custom 
may prevail. Some American physicians, while 



CREMA TION. 43 

conceding all, or nearly all, that the supporters of 
cremation in Europe allege against interment 
there, sometimes deny the validity of the objec- 
tions on this side of the ocean. The reasons 
they give may be plausible, but that is the best 
that can be said of them. As shown in preceding 
paragraphs, deficiency of room for the accommo- 
dation of the dead is already a condition here, 
with its repulsive and horrid consequences in full 
view near our great cities, — and when one reflects 
how rapidly population here increases, with the 
development of all the incidents that in Europe 
have made the question of sepulture a burning 
question, one cannot help thinking these medi- 
cal objectors very short-sighted. The truth is 
that we have cities, New Orleans being one of 
them, to which every argument for cremation, 
valid in Europe, is already circumstantially and 
emphatically applicable, and there is really no 
city or town in the land in which a wise fore- 
sight would not perceive in the introduction of 
cremation a needed safeguard against probable 
peril to health and life. 

When in 1874 the great London physician, Sir 
Henry Thompson, published as his conviction 
that " no dead body is ever placed in the soil 
without polluting the earth, the air, and the 
water above and about it," the saying at once 
called forth a corroborative response from emi- 
nent physicians and men of science in nearly 



44 CREMA TION. 

every part of Europe and in some parts of the 
United States. The fact thus asserted, the pol- 
luting nature of the dead body decaying in the 
ground, is just as well established and as gener- 
ally accepted by scientific men as is the poison- 
ous quality of arsenic or strychnine. Incidents in 
illustration of the fact are sufficiently abundant, 
though baldly stated, to fill a good-sized volume. 
A few of them must here suffice to show the 
extremely dangerous quality of those mortal re- 
mains which civilized mankind are accustomed 
to dispose of, with so little thought of the mis- 
chief they may produce when taken into the 
human system. The general purpose for which 
the facts are cited seems to render a careful clas- 
sification or systematical co-ordination of them 
unnecessary. 

Instances of the sudden death of grave-diggers 
caused by descent into vaults are literally multi- 
tudinous, it being, in fact, one of the recognized 
perils of the business. Sir Henry Thompson 
mentions cases that had recently occurred at St. 
Botolph's Church, London, at Merthyr Tydvil, in 
Wales, at Harwick, and at other places. In 
September, 1852, three grave-diggers in Paris 
suddenly died from accidentally inhaling the 
concentrated miasma which escapes from coffins. 
There is, however, no need of drawing further 
on the plentiful store of such facts at command, 
as it is generally admitted that fetid air exhaled 



CREMA TION. 45 

from the dead is fatal if breathed in a concen- 
trated state. Even when dissipated by the wind 
or mixed with the atmosphere, it is well known 
to lower the vital powers of persons living near 
old graveyards, — a fact fully attested by physi- 
cians during the discussion of the question in 
England respecting burial in cities. In that dis- 
cussion it was shown that low fevers, often fatal, 
resulted from the same cause. The famous Dr. 
Riecke testified that putrid emanations from 
graves operate in two ways, one set of effects 
being produced through the lungs by impurity 
of air from the mixture of irrespirable gases, the 
other set through the olfactory nerves by power- 
fully penetrating and offensive smells. 

Dr. Southwood Smith says that when present 
in the atmosphere morbific animal matter is con- 
veyed into the system through the thin and deli- 
cate walls of the air-vesicles of the lungs in the 
act of respiration, and instances how the vapor 
of turpentine, if only inhaled while walking 
through a recently-painted room, will exhibit its 
effects in some of the fluid excretions of the body 
even more rapidly than if it had been taken into 
the stomach. 

Some of the most illustrative facts bearing 
upon the subject are furnished by the old Eng- 
lish churches with their burial vaults. Dr. Cope- 
land relates that a gentleman of his acquaintance 
was poisoned by a rush of foul air from the grated 



46 CREMATION. 

openings at the side of the church-steps; he was 
seized with a malignant fever, which he commu- 
nicated to his wife. There are well-authenticated 
cases of pew-openers (sextons) being infected 
while shaking and cleaning the mattings of 
church-floors, these mats being saturated with 
the poison of the vaults. 

Such facts may seem to Americans at the first 
glance rather far-fetched, if not far-away, when 
they think of their beautiful cemeteries so iso- 
lated and so carefully regulated. But really we 
cannot feel much more confident or comfortably 
secure than those dwellers in the neighborhood 
of the pestilential old graveyards of London, who 
remained persistently incredulous about the cause 
assigned for prevalent epidemics because they 
could smell nothing offensive in the foul air they 
daily breathed. The truth was that medical men 
accustomed to the dissecting-room could instantly 
recognize the peculiar odor; they could even 
distinguish it from the stench of the sewers. It 
is, indeed, a fact too well established for denial 
or doubt that medical men accustomed to the dissect- 
ing-room can detect the peculiar odor in any cemetery 
that has been in use during a few years, — a fact by 
itself adapted to suggest the expediency as well 
as the desirableness of a reform wherever grave- 
yards exist. It shows that danger may lurk, or 
rather may hover, in the air about us unsuspected, 
even in places so adorned as to attract visitors, at 



CREMA TION. 47 

the very season of the year and hour of the day 
when the atmospherical conditions render them 
most deleterious. 

In illustration of the peril to which allusion is 
made a very significant fact is the extreme vital- 
ity of the morbid germs which lodge in graves 
and about them. Dr. Koch, of Germany, and 
Drs. Ewart and Carpenter, of England, are author- 
ities for the statement that the blood of an animal 
that died of splenic fever may be dried and kept for 
years and then pulverized into dust, and yet the 
disease-germs may survive with power to produce 
infection. Such a fact helps to make credible 
the statements of medical books concerning the 
origin of some celebrated epidemics. In 1828, 
we are told, the plague broke out at Modena, in 
Italy, as the consequence of an excavation in 
ground where three hundred years previously 
the victims of the plague had been interred. At 
Eyam, in Derbyshire, an excavation made a few 
years ago in ground wherein victims of the plague 
had been buried in 1665 caused an outbreak, not 
of the plague exactly, but of a malignant epidemic 
new to that region. In 1843 the population of 
Minchinhampton, England, was nearly decimated 
by a disease manifestly caused by using as a fer- 
tilizer for their gardens the rich soil of an aban- 
doned graveyard. In 1823 an outbreak of the 
plague in Egypt was confidently traced to the 
reopening of a disused graveyard at Kelioub, 



48 CREMA TION. 

fourteen miles from Cairo. Dr. Lyon Playfair's 
opinion that the fevers so prevalent in Rome 
during a part of the year are due to exhalations 
from the soil impregnated with animal matter, 
may serve to clinch the truth. 

As a single specimen of a numerous class of 
facts showing the deleterious qualities of dead 
bodies may be mentioned the fact established by 
vital statistics, that in France, Switzerland, and 
England the trades of the grave-digger and the 
undertaker rank among unhealthy occupations. 
As to the grave-diggers in France, Dr. Pietra 
Santa says that, though only the strongest men 
choose the work, the* duration of their lives is 
only two-thirds of the common life of their com- 
patriots; a statement which implies a vast im- 
provement in the nature of the occupation in the 
last few hundred years. In the middle ages, 
when burial in churches was common, the grave- 
digger's chances of life w r ere pretty much the 
chances of a soldier of a forlorn-hope. " They 
fell victims by hundreds to their horrible duties," 
says Wegmann-Ercolani ; who, by the way, ob- 
serves that even now they are " mostly pale of 
face and seldom healthy;" meaning those of 
Switzerland, or perhaps speaking generally. 

Upon the manner in which graveyards exert 
their defiling and poisonous influence through 
air and water much light has been shed by the 
great chemist of Munich, Professor Pettenkofer. 



CREMATION. 49 

While preparing for the Bavarian government 
a report on the cholera epidemic of 1854, it oc- 
curred to him that the air in or under the ground 
might be as worthy of examination as the water 
there, or as the air above the surface. It was 
not, however, until 1870 that he engaged in those 
elaborate investigations which have made ground- 
air (grundluft) as familiar a word in chemistry 
and in common life as ground-water (grundwasser). 
He showed that the ground-air actually differs in. 
composition from the air of the atmosphere. To 
be sure, it is made up of the same gases, viz., 
oxygen, nitrogen, and carbonic acid, but the pro- 
portion of these gases in the air beneath our feet 
is subject to great variation, while in the atmos- 
phere about us it is nearly constant. Most prac- 
tically important is the fact experimentally estab- 
lished by Pettenkofer, that the amount of carbonic 
acid in the ground-air is very much greater than 
in the air of the atmosphere, though varying 
somewhat in quantity with the season, and in- 
creasing with the depth. He showed that the 
ground is pervaded by water and gases to the 
depth of twelve or even fourteen feet, the ground- 
water occupying the pores and crevices of the 
earth when the air is driven out. He showed 
that the ground beneath our feet is the scene of 
continual movement or circulation, the ground- 
water and the ground- air changing places. Rain- 
water not evaporated enters the earth and trickles 
q d 5 



50 CREMATION. 

down until it encounters an impervious or water- 
tight stratum, in its descent expelling air impreg- 
nated with morbid germs, which are thus mingled 
with the air we breathe. By the descent of the 
water fresh supplies of organical germs are car- 
ried down to lodge there and be again expelled, 
or else conveyed by the ground-water into the 
nearest wells or streams. The whole movement 
much depends upon the alternation of dry and 
wet weather, w r ith warmth, as it may serve or 
may be needed. Every one perceives that if 
Pettenkofer's researches and conclusions are 
sound, then every dead body put into the ground, 
however far down, is and must be a source of 
corruption and infection ; his investigations being 
in fact a complete experimental demonstration 
of Sir Henry Thompson's declaration cited some 
pages back. Furthermore, those who have in 
Germany w 7 atched the course of certain epi- 
demics, typhus fever, for example, concede that 
the great chemist was right in connecting the 
outbreak of zymotic epidemics with the sinking 
of the ground-water, and the consequent acces- 
sion of morbid germs to the atmosphere. But 
Pettenkofer's investigations have been introduced 
here for the reason that they furnish an easy 
explanation of facts which, in whatever way ex- 
plained, prove irresistibly the infectious and 
poisonous agency of decaying animal bodies. 
Thanks to the microscope and to the scientific 



CREMATION. 51 

rigor and skill with which it is now employed, 
the fact can be determined in many cases wdth 
absolute certainty. Only two or three examples 
need be cited, being illustrations of w T hich re- 
ports can be easily found in the medical journals 
or in text-books. 

Some years ago a frightful epidemic raged in 
the Italian villages of Ritondella and Bollita, of 
which the origin was unmistakably traced to the 
cemeteries. They occupied the top of a hill, from 
whose base issued the springs used by the vil- 
lagers for all household purposes, the rain-water 
which supplied the springs receiving its deadly 
quality from the human remains through which 
it passed. More recently the Monumental Ceme- 
tery at Milan, situated on a hill to the north 
of the city, was proved to be the source of a 
fatal epidemic that prevailed in parts of the city, 
— the w r ells being the channels of communica- 
tion. 

Professor Reinhard, a distinguished chemist, is 
authority for the following statements. Large 
steers, victims of the cattle plague, had been 
buried near Dresden at a depth of twelve feet. 
In the following year the water of a well one 
hundred feet from the fosse had a fetid color and 
indicated the presence of butyrate of lime. 

Striking illustrations of the truth of Petten- 
kofer's results were recently exhibited in a ceme- 
tery at Manchester, England. There graves, only 



52 CREMATION. 

a few hours after they had been excavated and 
left standing open, had to be chemically or me- 
chanically ventilated before men could descend 
into them, being literally full of carbonic acid 
gas, which had flowed into them from the sur- 
rounding soil. It was the ground-air which, if 
left undisturbed, would have been forced upward 
into the atmosphere by the next sinking of the 
ground-water caused by rain. As has been often 
proved, this poisonous air frequently finds its way 
into churches whose floors are below the level of 
the adjoining church-yards. It is the air, often 
bearing germs more deadly than itself, which 
hangs over cemeteries, rendering them at times 
dangerous places in which to linger. In the 
strata of air lying in a prolonged calm above a 
cemetery Professor Selmi, of Mantua, discovered 
an organic corpuscule (the septo-pneuma) which 
considerably vitiates the atmosphere, altering it 
to the detriment of the human economy. " This 
substance," says Dr. Pietra Santa, " which it is 
easy to collect and isolate, if placed in a solution 
of glycose, produces the phenomenon of putrid 
fermentation, and gives birth to a considerable 
quantity of bacteria similar to those which are 
manifested in butyric fermentation. Some drops 
of this solution injected under the skin of a 
pigeon brings on the symptoms of typhic in- 
fection, and death supervenes on the third day. 
Infiltrated into water-courses the substance has 



CREMATION. 53 

doubtless carried infection and death into impor- 
tant towns." 

Another fact of like import is furnished by the 
investigations of Dr. Freire, of Rio de Janeiro, 
respecting the causes of the epidemic yellow 
fever in that city. He found that " the soil of 
the cemeteries in which the victims of the dis- 
ease had been interred was literally alive with 
microbian organisms precisely identical with 
those found in the excreta and blood of those 
who had died of yellow fever in the hospitals." 
This minute organism, we are told, permeates 
the soil of cemeteries even to the surface. The 
peril to life and health involved in such a fact is 
fully comprehended only when we recollect the 
astonishing vitality of the germs of pestilence, 
as illustrated in foregoing statements concerning 
the reproduction of the plague by opening the 
ground in which its victims had been interred 
centuries before, though the peril must seem 
sufficiently real even to those who reject those 
statements as incredible. 

In connection with this topic it is worth while 
to make brief mention of those interesting, though 
not generally known, researches of Professor 
Selmi concerning what he calls alcaloidi cadaverici, 
or ptomaines. By protracted experiments, the 
Professor showed, and his results have been con- 
firmed by other investigators, that the common 
constituents of the human body, as the brain, the 

5* 



54 CREMATION. 

blood, fibrin, etc., perfectly innocuous in health, 
are rapidly converted by decomposition, under 
certain conditions of heat and moisture, into 
deadly poisons, named ptomaines. He even 
showed that death does not always precede the 
change, but that when the disease is one that in- 
duces internal decomposition of the plasmatical 
or the histological elements, the transformation 
into ptomaines may take place while the patient 
is alive, and also immediately after death, before 
any indication of external putrefaction becomes 
apparent.* 

Two facts must be mentioned, for the reason 
that they set forth the danger to which we may 
be exposed not only without our own apprehen- 
sion or suspicion of its presence, but actually 
while we deem ourselves peculiarly safe. The 
first of them is the fact " well established," says 
the London Lancet, " that the surest carrier and 
most deadly fruitful nidus of zymotic contagion 
is the brilliant, enticing-looking water charged 
with the nitrates which result from decompo- 
sition of animal matter." In other words, water 
impregnated with the nitrates and nitrites fur- 
nished by adjacent graves is often peculiarly 



* Ptomaines od Alcaloidi Cadaverici e Prodotti Analoghi 
da certe Malattie in Correlazione colla Medicina legale. Me- 
morie del Prof. Francesco Selmi. Bologna, 1881. See also 
Note B. 



CREMATION. 55 

tempting to the appetite from its brilliant, spark- 
ling appearance and mineral quality. And yet 
those who indulge the taste thus flattered imbibe 
disease and, it may be, death. The second fact 
just alluded to is the fact that the soil deemed 
best adapted to the purposes of a cemetery, be- 
ing dry, close, and yet porous, is precisely the 
soil in which the subterranean circulatory sys- 
tem ascertained by Pettenkofer is most perfectly 
exemplified. In such a well-chosen graveyard 
the ground-water and the ground-air most easily 
and perfectly change places, and most effectually 
convey from the greatest depth and to the 
greatest distance those organic germs which are 
the seeds of epidemics. 

Other facts might be urged in illustration of 
the danger to health which lurks in graveyards, 
and indeed in every grave, but enough has been 
said, it is believed, to establish the case to the 
satisfaction of reflecting and candid persons. 
The Roman saying, that the health of the people 
is the supreme law, applies with as much force 
to sanitary as to political and social conditions, 
and therefore any custom which can be shown 
to be injurious to the popular health is a proper 
subject for agitation and reform. Though crema- 
tion, the only adequate substitute for interment, 
has been somewhat discussed in this country, 
Americans are considerably behind the leading 
nations of Europe in the amount and character 



56 CREMATION. 

of the interest they have shown in its considera- 
tion. 

Italy is the country in which the reform has 
been carried forward with most energy and suc- 
cess. It was started there with some slight ante- 
cedent advantage in the legislation of some of 
the states, as when, in July, 1822, the bodies of 
the poet Shelley and his friend Captain "Williams, 
cast up by the sea, were burned on the shore, the 
act w^as one prescribed by the quarantine laws of 
Tuscany. About the year 1856, a memoir pre- 
pared by Dr. Coletti, Rector of the University 
of Padua, for the Academy of Science and Liter- 
ature in that city, strongly commended the prac- 
tice of cremation. In 1866, Dr. Giro published 
an essay in which he contended that inhumation 
is a practice opposed to humane sentiment, public 
health, and high civilization. This paper was 
widely read by the educated classes, and it is said 
to have attracted the particular attention of phy- 
sicians, whose professional experience and knowl- 
edge enabled them to recognize the truth of the 
most important statements and conclusions of 
the essayist. It is certain that the year 1869 
witnessed a noteworthy increase of interest in 
the subject, not lessened by a resolution in that 
year passed by the International Medical Con- 
gress at Florence. It was introduced by Profes- 
sors Coletti and Castiglione, and in the name of 
public health and civilization it expressed the de- 



CREMATION. 57 

sire of the Congress " that every possible means 
should be employed to obtain such legislation as 
might be necessary to render legal the substitution 
of incineration for inhumation in disposing of 
the dead." The year 1870 was notable for the 
number of papers published and discussions held 
on the subject, French physicians and men of 
science taking part in the debate with reference 
to the dead of the Franco-German war then in 
progress. In 1871 the Medical Congress assem- 
bled in Rome passed substantially the same res- 
olution that it had passed in Florence, using 
somewhat stronger terms ; and in the same year 
Dr. Pini published a remarkable paper in favor 
of cremation. In 1872 important papers on the 
same side of the question were published by Drs. 
Ayr, Valeriani, Peyriani, and Polli, the most val- 
uable being the paper in which Dr. Polli gave 
account of his experiments in the cremation of 
animals at the Milan gas-works. In 1873 inter- 
est in the subject among the Italians had almost 
become enthusiasm ; it was widely extended as 
well as intense. The Royal Institute of Science 
and Letters of Lombardy petitioned the Italian 
Parliament to " take prompt measures to secure 
for Italy the honor of having inaugurated the 
great and beneficent reform, and of having thus 
set the example to other civilized nations." In 
the same year Drs. Brunetti and Gorini per- 
formed their famous experiments, in which they 



58 CREMATION. 

showed how completely the body could be re- 
duced to ashes without the exhibition of any 
sight, sound, or smell to move the disgust or 
wound the sensibilities of the most susceptible 
or fastidious. 

In 1874 a memorable meeting was held at 
Milan, at which representatives of all classes 
were present, for the purpose of organizing a 
cremation society. After speeches by several 
eminent men, the meeting unanimously requested 
the Italian government to legalize cremation of 
the dead under the immediate supervision of the 
syndics of the communes, leaving the mode of 
sepulture optional, however, — that is, allowing 
persons and families to practice cremation or 
not as they pleased. Such was the regular be- 
ginning of the new mode in modern Italy, though 
during several years before bodies seem to have 
been cremated without either permission or inter- 
ference on the part of the authorities. In fact, at 
this meeting in Milan Dr. Lombardi, the Sicilian 
poet, delighted sentimental admirers of the new 
mode by stating that certain persons of his ac- 
quaintance had bten accustomed to plant, with 
a beautiful result, the seeds of small flowering 
plants in the ashes of their deceased friends. At 
present cremation is regarded with steadily-in- 
creasing favor in Italy. Several furnaces are in 
operation and others in preparation, and the in- 
dications are that it will be preferred Itv a large 



CREMA riON. 59 

majority of the people, to whom, in the words 
of Professor Gaetano Pini, it seems " a poetical 
and humane means of destroying our bodies and 
of delivering them from putrefaction when they 
have been stricken by death/'* 

Of Professor Brunetti's experiments, before 
mentioned, the results were exhibited at the 
Vienna Exposition of 1873 in the form of three 
and three-fourths pounds of delicate white ashes 
in a glass box, inscribed with the words, Vermibns 
erepti, puro consumimur igni. It is hardly possible 
to describe in words too strong the effect produced 
upon intelligent visitors by the sight. It operated 
like infection. The municipal authorities of Vi- 
enna at once took steps to introduce cremation as 
an alternative for all who should prefer the method. 
Multitudes of Germans were not less impressed, 
and lost little time in beginning the agitation 
for reform. Dr. Richter (who is also a univer- 
sity professor), Staff Physician Dr. Trusen, Med- 
ical Counsellor Dr. Kuechenmeister, Dr. Baffin- 
sky, Dr. Bernstein, Dr. Mosckau, Professor Bock, 
Professor Reclam, and Dr. Siemens may be men- 
tioned as a few of the conspicuous men who have 
taken a leading part in the movement, and the 
results of the discussion were long ago apparent 



* " Mezzo poetico e gentile per disfare i nostri corpi colpiti 
da morte e liberarli dalla putredine." — La Salute, Giornale 
d'Igiene Popolare, vol. vii. p. 228. 



60 CREMATION. 

in the establishment and activity of several ere- 
mation-furnaces, one of which, the one^at Gotha, 
had consumed one hundred and thirty-nine bodies 
some weeks ago. In some states the government 
has interfered with the movement, or the prac- 
tical results would be more important than they 
are. But they are by no means insignificant, 
and the friends of cremation in Germany are so 
well organized in societies for the promotion of 
the reform by mutual co-operation that no doubt 
is felt of the advancement of the cause.* 

In Switzerland the reform has advanced more 
rapidly than in Germany, having received a pow- 
erful impulse from a ghastly phenomenon at 
Zurich. The removal of the remains from one 
of the principal graveyards having become neces- 
sary, it was found on examination that all or 
nearly all the bodies had been changed into that 
peculiar substance named adipocere, of course 
presenting a most offensive and even shocking 
sight to surviving friends and relatives. In truth, 
the impression was so profound and ineffaceable 
that the recollection of it, after the lapse of thirty 
years, gave animation to the efforts and effect 
to the appeals of those w T ho, inspired at Vienna, 
have been laboring to introduce the practice of 
cremation. Many clergymen, both Catholic and 
Protestant, Oberpfarrer Dr. Lang at the head of 



* See Note C. 



CREMATION. 61 

them, have favored the movement, and the well- 
known Professor Kinkel and Dr. Wegmann-Er- 
colani may stand as representatives of the many 
laymen by whose activity the cause has pros- 
pered. 

Even the great London physician, Sir Henry 
Thompson, confesses how deeply he was im- 
pressed by Brunetti's exhibition at Vienna, 
though he is known to have derived his convic- 
tion in favor of cremation from a previous study 
of the subject. His articles in the Contemporary 
Review in 1874 were read with deep interest and 
respect on the Continent as well as in England. 
Naturally, in England the conservative spirit so 
predominant there took the alarm, and showed 
in many petty comments and untimely sneers 
how gladly it would disable the innovator. 
And yet the only person who stepped forward to 
encounter him in argument was Mr. Holland, 
the salaried inspector of burials, — a circumstance 
which Sir Henry did not fail to call attention to 
in his rejoinder. 

Though the agitation transferred to Great 
Britain by Sir Henry Thompson has been there 
carried on with less outward display, the interest 
taken in the question is believed to be not less 
real or general than on the Continent. From 
the English literature of the last three hundred 
and fifty years it would be possible, if I am not 
mistaken, to form a catena or chain of testi- 



G2 CREMATION. 

monies favorable to cremation as the more grace- 
ful and judicious mode of sepulture. As an 
illustration of what is meant take two or three 
specimens. In his celebrated political romance* 
Sir Thomas More represents the citizens of his 
commonwealth as thinking very ill of a person 
" whom they see depart from his life agaynst his 
will," " and them that so die, they burie with 
sorow and silence." " Contrariewise all that de- 
parte merely (merrily) and ful of good hope, for 
them no man mourneth ;" . . . " and at the last, 
not with mourning sorow, but with a great rever- 
ence they bourne (burn) the bodies." Passing 
over intermediate writers, we find Robert Southey 
in a letter saying, that " the custom of interment 
makes the idea of a dead friend more unpleas- 
ant, — we think of the grave, corruption, and 
worms ; burning would be better." Southej^, as 
everybody knows, was, after his hot youth, one 
of the most conservative of men, a Tory of the 
Tories indeed, and devoutly religious withal. 
And then w 7 e have a man of so different a temper 
and breeding as Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beacons- 
field) declaring that " what is called God's acre 
is really not adapted to the country which we 
inhabit, the times in which we live, and the spirit 
of the age." All these expressions of opinion 
and feeling were given long before the present 



* Utopia (Arber's Reprint), p. 147. 



CREMATION. 63 

discussion began, and of course before the re- 
sources of modern science had been thought of 
as furnishing means of cremation compared with 
which the classical funeral pyre should seem 
barbarous. 

When the Roman satirist* bade the lovers of 
militaiy glory place Hannibal in scales and find 
how little he weighed, and in reference to Alex- 
ander, of Macedon, the same writer observes 
that only death shows how small are the little 
bodies of men,f he was thinking of the remains 
left by the flames of the pile. And yet, unless 
favored by a strong wind, the cremation of those 
days would be very imperfect. Sylla, the burn- 
ing of whose body did so much to extend the 
practice of cremation among the Romans, had 
acquired the sobriquet of Felix, or The Lucky, 
from the uniformly good fortune which had at- 
tended him through life, and ancient historians 
do not neglect to state that he was lucky even to 
the last, as a strong wind suddenly arose by 
which his funeral pile was thoroughly kindled 
and his mortal remains reduced to ashes. In the 
Homeric passage already referred to, when, as 
the poet says, " the pile of dead Patroclus burned 
not," Achilles invokes Boreas and Zephyrus to 



* Juvenal, Sat. x., 148, 173. 

f " 3Iors sola fatetur 

Quantula sint hominum corpuscula, 



64 CREMATION. 

make the fire effectual. These citations, by no 
means necessary to prove so familiar a truth of 
nature, may serve to quicken or revive in some 
memories their conception of what is sometimes 
called classical sepulture. 

The disclosure of long-buried urns, and modern 
experiments upon the ancient mode of cremation, 
leave no doubt that even under the most favora- 
ble conditions cinders and scraggy clinkers would 
generally be found among the human ashes of 
the funeral pyre. But Professor Brunetti, of 
Padua, Professor Re clam, of Leipsic, and Dr. 
Siemens, of Berlin, have each contrived a method 
by w T hich the combustion is so perfect as to leave 
no such repulsive remnants. It is not here neces- 
sary to enter into details easily accessible to those 
who desire to investigate the subject. It will be 
deemed sufficient to say that any one of three or 
four slightly different arrangements of apparatus 
for cremation can be set up at no very great ex- 
pense, in connection with an edifice for the ac- 
commodation of relatives and other attendants. 
Those funeral rites and ceremonies deemed by 
Christians appropriate can be performed with 
the great advantage of avoiding all exposure to 
rain, cold, damp ground, and such like causes of 
much sickness and many deaths every year under 
the existing custom. 

As to the preservation of the remains, there 
will be ample opportunity for the exercise of 



CREMATION. 65 

judgment and for the indulgence or gratification 
of sentiment. The relics, precious to affectionate 
kindred, are absolutely harmless wherever de- 
posited. In twenty minutes, or a little more, the 
body has been resolved into its primary constitu- 
ents and distributed for the uses each is divinely 
intended to subserve ; a process too disgusting 
and horrible for contemplation, or even a thought, 
as it goes on in the grave, but as here effected by 
the pure agency of fire, most beautiful and con- 
soling. The water, nearly seventy-five per cent, 
of the whole, the carbonic acid and ammonia, 
have gone into the atmosphere in the form of 
gases and perhaps a little vapor; the mineral 
constituents, more or less oxidized, the lime, 
phosphorus, magnesia, etc., remain in the ashes. 
It is really difficult to conceive that rational 
affection, following the departed with cherished 
memories of their looks and ways in life, would 
rather think of them as rotting in the ground, 
hideous skeletons, or yet w^orse, still masses of 
corruption and worms, than as at once become a 
portion of the all-pervasive life of nature, and 
the little heap of ashes that may be kept in a 
graceful urn, or in a flower-vase. 

To some it is no slight recommendation of this 
mode of sepulture that it removes all possibility 
of premature burial, — a dread from which even 
the strongest minds are not exempt, as proved by 
the directions prescribed in the wills of the late 
e 6* 



66 CREMATION. 

Lord Lytton and other eminent men, to avoid 
even the possibility of the horror. The practice 
of " body-snatching," whether for traffic or for 
ransom, would be ended forever by its general 
adoption. But one of the strongest arguments, 
or greatest practical inducements, for the intro- 
duction of the mode is the reduction it would 
effect in the expense of funerals. True, the 
wealthy or the ostentatious might make the mode 
as costly as they pleased, as we know that the 
grandees and rich aristocracy of Rome, even 
under the Republic, laid out vast sums in build- 
ing and decorating tombs in which only an urn 
or a few urns were placed. There is, however, 
no doubt that in this cotmtry the cost of sepulture 
might and probably would be so much reduced 
as to render the change of custom an object of 
even national economy. This topic has been so 
well presented by the Rev. Mr. Beuglass, of New 
York, that I cannot do better than cite the para- 
graphs in which he compares the two modes of 
cremation and interment with reference to ex- 
pense. 

" Apart," he says, a from the burial lot and 
the tombstone and the expense of carriages, the 
average cost of a funeral among the lower mid- 
dle classes in and about New York is not far 
from one hundred and fifty dollars. The average 
cost of burial lots in "Woodlawn and Greenwood, 
each containing space for six graves, is about 






CREMATION. 67 

four hundred and fifty dollars, or say seventy- 
five dollars a grave. The cost of single graves 
in the public lots is twenty-five dollars each. 
The cost of a modest head-stone and foot-stone 
and their erection will add seventy-five dollars 
more, making a total of two hundred and fifty 
or three hundred dollars. These three hundred 
dollars, more or less, have to be paid in advance 
by the poor, to raise which they alone know 
what sacrifices must be made. 

" On the other hand, apart from carriage hire, 
which we may assume to be about the same in 
each case, the cost of cremation decorously per- 
formed, including the case in which the body is 
carried to the crematory, should not exceed forty 
dollars, while the cost of the terra-cotta urn of 
classic pattern, the most tasteful and appropriate 
possible, could not exceed five dollars. Add ten 
dollars for a niche in the columbarium in which 
the urn may find a permanent resting-place in 
case the friends should not wish to take it to 
their homes, and still another five dollars for an 
inscribed tablet under the niche, and we have 
sixty dollars, as against four or five times that 
sum for earth-burial." 

Of course the expense would somewhat vary 
with the place, but there is no place where the 
difference would not be as much in favor of cre- 
mation as the cheaper as it is in New York. 
When to the consideration of the cost of inhuma- 



68 CREMATION. 

tion we add the great and ever-increasing value 
of the ground near large cities set apart for 
cemeteries, we have an economical argument of 
prodigious force in favor of the change. 

The cause of cremation has been somewhat 
injured by some of the arguments urged in its 
support. One of the reasons offered in its favor 
by Dr. Rudler, of Paris, is the advantage that 
might be derived from the combustion of bodies 
in the form of illuminating gas for general pur- 
poses ; and even Sir Henry Thompson made the 
mistake — surprising in such an advocate — of 
proposing that the ashes should be used as a 
fertilizer. Grossly utilitarian considerations seem 
especially out of place and incongruous in view 
of the refined character of the proposed reform ; 
a reform w^hich appeals directly to sentiment 
against the coarse and vulgar habit of consign- 
ing the honored or beloved dead to slow putre- 
faction and the devouring worm. Of such rea- 
sons for cremation, however, it is best to say with 
Dante,* — 

" Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." 

Of some of the opposition to cremation it is 
impossible not to see the source in mere antago- 
nism to the new. Though an ancient mode of 
sepulture, it has been long in desuetude, and it 

* Inferno, iii. 51. 



CREMA TION. 69 

must therefore be opposed, — a state of mind in 
many which causes a German writer on the sub- 
ject to recollect a pungent saying of Heine's 
brilliant enemy, Theodor Boerne. Pythagoras, 
said Boerne, having discovered a wonderful geo- 
metrical truth, forthwith expressed his joyful 
thanks by sacrificing a hecatomb, — that is, a 
hundred oxen, — and ever since, when anything 
new is brought forth or commended to public 
attention, forthwith all the oxen, in a sort of 
panic fear, begin to bellow. Really, some of 
the objections offered to cremation much remind 
one of the voice of bullocks, even association 
with which the Son of Sirach deemed unpropi- 
tious to mental illumination. It is not intended, 
however, thus opprobriously to characterize all 
the reasons offered against the proposed reform, 
some of which are entitled to respectful treat- 
ment and such answers as may be forthcoming. 

It is objected that cremation is of heathen 
origin and tendency. But it has been shown 
that inhumation is equally of heathen origin, 
and that even after Christianity had been widely 
diffused in the Roman world inhumation was still 
preferred to cremation by some of the heathen 
for reasons of their own. Moreover, it is cer- 
tain that on many of the Christian tombs in the 
catacombs letters are inscribed which the histo- 
rian Merevale regards as evidence that the early 
Christians sometimes burned their dead. But 



70 CREMATION. 

we can well afford to concede the contrary, ad- 
mitting that the Christian custom has always 
been interment. Though they did not adopt 
cremation from the heathen, they adopted and 
adapted mat^ other customs, such as their mode 
of celebrating Christmas, Easter, New Year's 
day, and other festivals. Then, though they did 
not adopt cremation, they adopted the funereal 
urn with its ashen contents, — the urn having been 
one of the most common symbols in churches and 
church-yards in very early times and through the 
middle ages down to the present day, — while 
" peace to his ashes" is a phrase of constant cur- 
rency in the funeral sermons of the Christian 
clergy, — a phrase which must have always re- 
minded intelligent hearers of the practice in 
which it originated, the practice of incineration. 
It is, indeed, not quite comprehensible how the 
phrase could have come into such general use 
if Christians never practised cremation, and cer- 
tainly if the use implies nothing else, it implies 
that the custom alluded to must have been re- 
garded without either disgust or disapproval. 
Manifestly they saw nothing of heathen ten- 
dency in the mode, and at the present day it is 
surely too late to discover what they failed to 
detect. 

To discuss the objection founded upon the 
doctrine, or rather upon the misapprehension of 
the doctrine, of the resurrection would almost 



CREMATION. 71 

seem an affront to the intelligence of the least 
instructed Christian. Since, however, the actual 
Bishop of Lincoln, Dr. Wordsworth, has expressed 
his fear that the immediate effect of introducing 
the practice of cremation would be to undermine 
the popular belief in that article of faith, a few 
words may be said on the subject without offence. 
Probably the Christian faith, the doctrine of the 
resurrection included, is in more peril to-day 
from the vocal demonstrativeness of professional 
defenders who run to meet imaginary enemies 
than from the practice of cremation, though it 
had become the prevalent custom. Lord Shaftes- 
bury, an earnest Christian, settled the point 
started by the Bishop when he said, " If burn- 
ing the body interfered with the resurrection, 
what would become of the blessed martyrs?" 
In a former page we have seen that even in the 
third century intelligent Christians perceived 
nothing in the practice of cremation incompati- 
ble with the belief in the resurrection. In truth, 
then and for centuries afterwards, a favorite sym- 
bol of the resurrection — a symbol that figured in 
popular hymns, in sermons, and in the pictorial 
adornment of churches — was that mysterious 
Arabian bird which dies by fire and revives in 

its offspring : 

" Jam sponte crematur 
Ut redeat; gaudetque mori festinus in ortum."* 

*Claudiani Eidyllia, i. 57. 



72 CREMATION. 

Dr. Wordsworth received the most effectual 
answer from his episcopal brother, the Bishop 
of Manchester, who said that " no intelligent 
faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is 
affected by the manner in which or the time in 
which this mortal body of ours crumbles into 
dust/' adding the important advice that " Chris- 
tians should in mind dissociate the resurrection 
from all physical conditions." 

Somewhat allied to the foregoing objection is 
the objection derived from the language of the 
Bible in the divine sentence upon Adam, " In 
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till 
thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast 
thou taken ; for dust thou art and unto dust shalt 
thou return." In order to perceive condemna- 
tion or disapproval of cremation in such language 
one must regard rather the dead letter of the 
text than its metaphysical meaning and vivifying 
thought, as the body which is consumed by fire 
returns at last to the ground as inevitably as the 
body that rots in " the cold obstruction" of the 



grave. 



Really, it is neither sound theology nor healthy 
piety that strives continually by appeals to the 
letter of Scripture to place Christianity as a high 
wall across the pathway of improvement. By 
looking too intensely, however reverently, at the 
letter while overlooking the spirit of the sacred 
books, theologians have been often led to uphold 



CREMATION. 73 

strange usages. No doubt the Scriptures teach 
that the body of a pious man is a temple of the 
Holy Ghost, — but when the soul has left its tene- 
ment of clay the tenement is a temple no longer, 
but a mere habitation of worms. It is mere 
matter of dangerous quality that must be put 
away out of sight to prevent harm. If not 
already, it speedily becomes poison, and to regard 
it as anything else is sheer superstition or igno- 
rance or affectation. To put it away where it can 
do no mischief to the living is a social duty, even 
as to put it away in a manner least painful or 
disagreeable to sensitive kindred is a duty of 
common courtesy. To combine the two duties 
in the most effectual method prescribed by 
science and mechanical skill, irrespectively of 
old prejudices or anile traditions, is a duty dic- 
tated by Christianity. To appeal to the book of 
Genesis or to Paul's epistle to the Corinthians as 
containing texts which prohibit that mode of 
action, or suggest doubts as to the pi'ety or pro- 
priety of such action, is a bit of pedantry at 
which St. Paul, if he revisited the earth, would 
smile grimly, or perhaps laugh quietly, accord- 
ing to his mood, or the condition of his " thorn" 
at the moment. Certainly, it would amuse, if 
it did not provoke him into some show of irrita- 
tion. 

The only scientific objection yet urged against 
cremation is one which might be justly dismissed 

D 7 



74 CREMATION, 

as irrelevant, inasmuch as it assumes a state of 
facts which nobody contemplates as a proper or 
even possible consequence of the establishment 
of the custom. The objector assumes that one 
result of the introduction of the custom would 
be the combustion of all, or nearly all, animal 
bodies at death, and then he argues that such a 
substitution of the combustion of animal remains 
for their natural decay would cut off the great 
source of ammonia, which is the actual staple of 
the vegetable kingdom. The equilibrium of ani- 
mal and vegetable life would be destroyed, says 
the objector, and the result would be disastrous. 
If this objection had not been first presented by 
a chemist of some reputation for science it would 
have attracted no attention, — it would have been 
ascribed to ignorance or grave misapprehension 
on the part of the objector. At present, the ob- 
jection is remembered chiefly as one of the dead 
Professor Mohr's many crotchets, a love for 
which in the pursuit of originality injured not a 
little his professional reputation. In fact, the 
ammonia diffused in combustion reaches the 
ground and performs its part in the vegetable 
kingdom not less certainly and really more 
rapidly than if the body had been buried. And 
again, animal remains are by no means as alleged 
the only source of ammonia. In a paper by 
Schoenbeiri published in 1846, it was shown that 
during the evaporation of water, whether in the 



CREMATION. 75 

cold or at the boiling-point, nitrate of ammonia 
is always formed. In the manufacture also of 
illuminating gas sal ammoniac in great quantities 
is produced.* Indeed, the assertion of a well- 
known local chemist that in Pittsburgh alone 
sufficient ammonia is produced to supply the 
continent is only a legitimate hyperbole. The 
objection is, in fact, both false and impertinent. 

There is only one other objection that may 
seem worthy of a moment's notice, — the medico- 
legal objection that cremation would increase 
crime by favoring the impunity of its perpetra- 
tors. If, it is urged, the victim of poison or 
other secret and unlawful mode of killing could 
be forthwith carried off to the furnace and con- 
sumed, the temptation to commit such crimes 
would be indefinitely multiplied. Most likely, 
the result would be the very reverse of what is 
thus anticipated. "With the introduction of the 
new method, there would doubtless be an in- 
crease of vigilance; there would be a functionary 
bound to take note of any suspicious circum- 
stance sufficient to warrant delay and investiga- 
tion. And in the case of actual crime, in the 
mere promptitude or earliness of the inquiry 
there would be a great advantage. "In every 
autopsy, but especially in every autopsy under- 
taken for forensic purposes," says Casper, " it is 



*See Wagner's Chemische Technologie, 1873, p. 272. 



76 CREMATION. 

greatly to be desired that the forensic physician 
should be enabled by the legal authorities to 
undertake the examination as soon after death 
as possible, before any of those various post- 
mortem, phenomena already described can occur 
to obscure facts, or to render their establishment 
impossible, as may only too readily be the case 
where putrescence has already set in." * At pres- 
ent the investigation is generally undertaken 
when it is too late, in cases of poison at least. 
But really the danger would be quite insignifi- 
cant. Embalming offers as ready means as 
cremation of concealing the traces of poison 
administered to kill, and yet who knows of any 
one resorting to the method ? Let the poisoner 
have his victim embalmed, and he can never be 
convicted on any evidence furnished by the re- 
mains. 

Besides such general objections as those briefly 
reviewed, very peculiar reasons are sometimes 
assigned in justification of American indifference 
to the subject. Of one of these reasons, the 
grand roominess of the country, the inadequacy 
has been already shown. The roominess is cer- 
tainly growing less with the lapse of every day, 



* Handbook of the Practice of Forensic Medicine, based 
upon Personal Experience. By Johann Ludwig Casper, M.D., 
Professor, etc., vol. i. p. 61. (Sydenham Society Publication, 
London, 1871.) 



CREMATION. 77 

and if the reform is really a good thing, we 
manifestly surrender our own advantage by fail- 
ing to embrace and use it at once, as by retain- 
ing the ancient usage we increase the difficulty 
of change, in full anticipation of making it at a 
more convenient season. Another reason as- 
signed why we may rightly feel comfortably 
content in our indifference is notable and sur- 
prising. It would be absurd for us, we are told, 
to take alarm at the dangers alleged to lurk 
beneath the ground while we take no heed of 
the more manifest dangers that lie, in full view, 
on the surface, filling with offal and animal 
bodies the very streams from which we draw the 
water we drink. As a stroke of satire or trait 
of irony the reason is good; as an argument 
against reform it is laden with all the abuses and 
abominations of our actual condition, social, 
sanitary, and political. The practice mentioned 
is an outrage upon decency, a violation of the 
laws of health, — a practice which will certainly 
be abolished along with, if not before, the custom 
of inhumation. It must, however, be admitted 
that animal remains exposed to the air and 
speedily consumed by the natural scavengers of 
land and water, are unquestionably less dele- 
terious and dangerous than they would be if 
buried in the earth. 



7* 



IS" O T E S. 



Note A, page 31. 

Probably the first person of European extraction 
whose remains were formally cremated on this side 
of the Atlantic was Henry Laurens, so eminent as a 
statesman before and during the war of the Kevolu- 
tion. Of Huguenot descent, he was born in Charles- 
ton, S. C, in 1724, and died in the same place in 
1792. He had received a first-rate education in 
Europe, and though engaged in business as a mer- 
chant during many years, he acquired great distinc- 
tion as a writer on political subjects, his pamphlets 
on the public questions of the time attracting much 
attention. Appointed minister to Holland, he was 
captured on the voyage thither by a British ship, and 
was confined for some time in the Tower as a rebel. 
There he was often visited by his friend of other 
years, Edmund Burke, by whose influence he was at 
length released. His remains were cremated in his 
garden, according to an injunction and detailed direc- 
tions given in his will. Laurens was greatly esteemed 
and loved by Washington, to whose military family 
he belonged when in active military service. 

Henry Barry, of Marion, in South Carolina, is 

79 



80 NOTES. 

mentioned as an early cremationist, whose remains 
were burned in accordance with his own injunction. 

The next instance is believed to have been that of 
the Baron de Palm, whose cremation at Washington, 
Pa., in December, 1876, was made so much of a sensa- 
tion by the newspapers. His remains were consumed 
in the crematory which the late Dr. Julius P. Le 
Moyne, of Washington, Pa., had constructed for his 
own use. 

Dr. Le Moyne was, during many years, a physi- 
cian of great local repute for knowledge and skill in 
his profession. His fame as a physician would have 
been much greater if he had not early become in- 
terested in the anti-slavery movement, to which he 
devoted much of his time and energy. Of the doc- 
tor might be truly said what Julius Caesar said of 
young Brutus, — Quicquid vult valcle vult. It was 
certainly true of his wish concerning American sla- 
very, upon which he waged relentless war as long as 
it existed ; and not very long after its overthrow, 
Dr. Le Moyne took up the practice of cremation as 
one worthy of his best endeavors to commend to 
public favor as the only right mode of sepulture. 
It would be interesting to know whether this step 
was spontaneous, the result of his own reflection, or 
was suggested by the published reports of the agita- 
tion of the subject in Europe. Whatever may have 
been the origin of his conviction, there can be no 
question that he made the subject his own by action 
as well as by thought. Besides much speaking and 
some writing in commendation of the method, he 
erected at his own expense the furnace which still 



NOTES. 81 

stands, and which has afforded a considerable number 
of persons, in anticipation of death, the consolation 
of knowing that their remains would escape the 
horrible doom of becoming the habitation of worms 
while slowly rotting in " the cold obstruction" of 
the ground. 



Note B, page 54. 



In the presence of such facts is it wholly absurd 
or too fanciful to suspect that the Greeks, with their 
acute sensibilities and penetrating glances into the 
life of nature, were not influenced by mere supersti- 
tion in entertaining what seem their extravagant 
notions about the defiling quality of the dead body ? 
They believed that a corpse polluted whatever was 
brought near it, and that not only men, but even the 
gods who touched or even looked upon it, were thus 
rendered unclean. In the " Hippolitus" of Euripides, 
line 1437, Diana is made to say, " It is not lawful for 
me to behold the dead." In the "Alcestis" of the 
same poet Apollo declares that he must leave the 
beloved abode of Admetus lest he should be defiled 
by the death of Alcestis, then about to take place. 
Even a man's peculiar genius or guardian spirit, the 
Greeks thought, did not stay with him until the end, 
but withdrew before life had quite departed. See 
the subject fully illustrated by Lessing in his essay, 
" Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet." — Lessing's Werke, 
Band v. s. 37. 



82 NOTES. 



Note C, page 60. 

In Germany the reform has had the advantage of 
whatever prestige it could derive from literature. 
The greatest name in German literature, that of 
Goethe, can be fairly cited in favor of cremation. 
In the " Naturl. Tochter," Aufzug iii. Auftritt 4, one 
of the characters breaks forth in a noble strain of 
poetry in commendation of the wiser custom of the 
ancients, weiser Brauch der Alten, etc. Platen 
also, said to be the favorite poet of the German 
ladies, has glorified fire-sepulture in a beautiful epi- 
gram, in which he invokes the holy flames to return 
and purify the dark, pestiferous atmosphere of death. 
And genial, popular Justinus Kerner, in a brilliant 
little poem of thirty lines on Cremation versus Burial, 
has set forth the advantages of one and the abomi- 
nations of the other mode in terms which must for- 
ever remain in the reader's memory. These passages 
of poetical argument are all quoted and applied by 
German writers on the subject. Among these Ger- 
man writings one is particularly commended to the 
attention of German-American readers, — "Die Lei- 
chenverbrennungvonden Gesichtspunkten derPietat, 
der Aesthetik, der Beligion, der Hygiene, der Ge- 
schichte, des Eechts und der National Oekonomie." 
Though the author, Mr. E. Schmidt, takes occasion 
to ventilate certain crotchets foreign to his subject, 
he writes with animation and vigor, and his tract 
cannot be read without a good result. 

THE END. 



